Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

Of the 90 bands playing Furnace Fest later this week:

• 46 bands have a website (51%)
• 23 bands don’t have a website, but use a “Link In Bio” service (25%)
• 36 bands have an email newsletter (40%)
• 21 bands have no website, and no email list, but most aren’t full-time bands anymore, so that makes sense.

(Here’s my Google Sheet with all the data – nerdy, I know)

Of the 36 bands with a newsletter, just three sent me a solid “Welcome Email,” while the others were plain confirmation emails.

As I wrote in ‘PUT YOUR WELCOME EMAIL TO WORK,’ your welcome email can help you make money:

1. A link to your store, maybe with a discount code
2. Your website, or the tour dates section
3. Your Patreon – some of your biggest fans might not even know you have one!
4. Your Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music pages
5. Your latest video on YouTube

Should you have a website? Probably.
Should you have an email list? Hell yes.

Both are pretty easy to set up these days,

As I wrote in ‘YOUR NEXT NEWSLETTER IS ALREADY WRITTEN,’ you can re-purpose your social media posts into weekly newsletters, especially since most of your followers don’t even see your content because of algorithms.

Add some more photos, a little bit of text, and you’ll make your fans who don’t spend six hours a day on social media very happy.

Draw some inspiration from the bands playing Furnace Fest this year; check out their websites, subscribe to some newsletters, and let’s make sure you’re reaching more of your fans in 2024.

Easiest platform to start building your email list? Substack.

Sign up, give it a name, upload a logo, add a tag line, and you’re done – now you’ve got a landing page.

It’s a start. It’s not forever. If you outgrow it, fine. Export your subscribers and go somewhere.

But compared to other offerings, I believe Substack to the be the easiest for anyone just starting out.

Ask some people to sign up now, and when you’re ready, you’ve got a few people on your list already.

Most of the creative people I talk to about starting newsletters say some variation of the following:

“I’m not that interesting.”

It’s along the lines of, “why would anyone care?” Or, “I don’t really do anything exciting.”

Then I look at their websites, and social media feeds and I have a good laugh.

Social media has us convinced that if we’re not going viral every other day, or our videos don’t get 100,000 views in the first four hours, we must be boring. Washed up. Nobody cares.

Yet these people I talk to are designers with a dreamy client list. Photographers who post breath taking photos. Musicians with amazing music and visuals. Editors, writers, builders, artists of all sorts, minds brimming with ideas, stories to keep you awake til the sun comes up…

But a throw-away social media post on a Tuesday night gets a few likes, and we let allow these platforms to feed us this idea that nobody cares.

Some songs will never see the light of day because they didn’t go viral on TikTok:

“You kind of live and die by overnight virality. That has now created a situation where qualified A&Rs with great ears, who are tenured, who are good with music and passionate about it, can’t really do their job the way they used to,” say Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic over at Rolling Stone.

See that?

TikTok has more sway over qualified A&R folks.

And social media has swayed artists everywhere into believing their work isn’t good enough.

Seth Godin in 2011 on “Getting serious about the attention economy:

“Every interaction comes with a cost. Not in cash money, but in something worth even more: the attention of the person you’re interacting with. Waste it–with spam, with a worthless offer, with a lack of preparation, and yes, with nervous dissembling, then you are unlikely to get another chance.”

Tweet another “new song” link, or post a static image to the Instagram feed when you should be posting a video (as IG boss Adam Mosseri said in this interview).

While the bar is low, there’s so much we can do, without a massive amount of effort.

Even with just plain old text:

🚫 “Hey, we’re on Revolver’s 6 Best Songs Right Now list.” [LINK]

✅ “Djent riffage that rumbles like a chunk of glacier breaking off and crashing into the choppy sea,” says Revolver Magazine [LINK]

Copy and paste what the established media outlet said about you, and then show it to your fans.

Do the thing that other people aren’t!

“Change comes from intrinsic forces, not extrinsic ones. If you think things are shit, you can — whisper it — stop making shit things.

We’ve be throwing “shit things” at the walls for so long it’s hard to notice the stink.

Now, do you have to chug Starbucks drinks to promote a new single, get 62K views, and covertly get 62K people to listen to track in the process?

Well, no.

You don’t need to make dance videos, or start a podcast, either.

But you need to do your thing, in a way that translates online, that your fans can actually view and get excited about.

Find a way to display your magic on these cursed platforms, and do it in a way that feels comfortable and sustainable.

The world needs you, and so do your fans.

Make it as simple as possible for your fans to subscribe to your email list.

Streamline the f*ck out of your landing page.

You want as few distractions as possible.

Less options.

Make it so easy to understand that a person can’t help but give you their email address.

A few notes about your landing page:

• Include your photos, your images, your logos, your branding. Do NOT let your landing page have any sort of DEFAULT look.
• Explain what they’re signing up for. Avoid the boring “sign up for updates” text – that’s for car dealerships and Kohls. Think of all the things you post on socials – I bet subscribers would love to see more of that!
• Don’t ask for a lot, in fact I recommend just asking for an email address. No need to go overboard with last name, city, town, zip code, phone number – you can ask for that later when you’ve developed your email list!
• Send a welcome / thanks email afterwards (if possible). You can use this email to link back to your website to watch your latest videos, or see your newest products.

There’s a few ways to build a landing page. Some are simple, and some more feature rich. Some are free, some will cost you a bit. Here’s some I’ve worked with over the years:

• Substack – (Free, then 10% if you turn on payments) they give you a pretty basic WELCOME page, which just asks for an email address, and if people have signed up for other Substack newsletters, their email address may already be filled in!
• Flodesk – ($35/mo) They offer some nice pre-built designs, and you can automate all sorts of responses.
• Tally – (Free) Can be bare bones, and provides a nice THANK YOU page when people sign up.
• Mailchimp – (Free up to 500 subscribers) A standard in the email marketing industry. Can be as complex or as simple as you make it.
• Your own website – Squarespace, WordPress and lots more offer some built-in ways for people to join your email list.

If you’ve got questions about any of these, get in touch!